Tuesday, October 09, 2007

M&Mcatures

One of the gigs I did last week was for the MARS candy company, drawing people as M&Ms. I worked for them for two days. On the first night, it was in between two other "normal" caricature gigs the same day. That was the toughest day of the gig. Obviously, M&Ms are round so we had three shapes we could pick from- completely round, oval, big at the bottom, or oval, big at the top. Not a lot of variety for our face shapes. Then, M&Ms also HAVE NO NOSES. AARRGGHHH!!! For some faces, this works fine. The nose is a subordinate detail anyway on them, so they don't need the nsoe to make the likeness. But for other faces, YOU ABSOLUTELY NEED THE NOSE. Man, there was this one guy with a HUGE honker of a nose, and I had such a hard time resisting drawing it. My likeness, without it, really sucked. If I'd had his nose in the pic, though, it would've been dead on. Oh well.

The second day of this gig, I started adding props to people, and a bit of background. I hadn't done that the first night. This made the gig go so much quicker. That first night, with no props, just big round noseless heads over and over.......

BORING.

But by this day, I was feeling a bit more inspired. Probably the sleep the night before had helped as well. Three gigs in one day that previous day made me pretty tired.

A fisherman. Duh.

A Karate M&M. The model was a nice guy who coulda kicked my butt in about two seconds, I'd guess. He's a black belt in a bunch of things.

I liked the likeness pretty well on both of these, actually. CONSIDERING the obvious limitations inherent in the style. I kept that official M&M cheat sheet above my paper, to keep me more "on model", and to remind myself not to draw noses!

All in all, it was a great gig. Great client, great fellow artists I worked with, great crowd of people.

Plus, we got lots of candy, so we're all stocked up for Halloween around here! BONUS!

4 comments:

The Hurricane said...

HOW FUN are these?!?!?! Can I ask, how long on avg did each one with a body in color take you!? Just wondering. ALSO--this looks like a fun exercise to push getting an even better likeness with even say, just eyes. I know we've talked about this before, but I swear,.. if I don't get the eyes just right, then the likeness if lost. GREAT JOB! :)

Angie said...

I'm melting over these Keelan!
Nice additions!
Especially the "M" fish!

How did you decide on color?
I'd pick green! :)

Keelan Parham said...

Maria, my time varied a bit more than usual, but I still did these in about ten minutes each. Some were up to fifteen, but most about ten. Depended on what their "prop" was, and what color I made them. some of the Chartpaks blend amazingly well, and some you have to go over a few times to get rid of the streaks.You're also right about it being a fun exercise to help with likenesses. The very fact that I COULDN'T draw noses on this gig, REALLY made me see them on the gig later that night, that was "normal". Also, I got to do varied face shapes. The combo of adding those back into my bag o tricks made my likenesses pretty strong on that gig. I'll try to post one or two from that gig when I can.

Keelan Parham said...

Angie,

I know what you mean by the green!
Actually, these days the green M&M in their advertising IS the female one. Plus, my Linden Green Chartpak marker rocks! It's one of my faves.